Digital BW, The Print

I've been making books of photos for the last 22 years, to give as 
Christmas presents to grandparents, uncles, etc.  My images, all B&W, are 
printed 8x8 (actually 7.5x7.5, leaving quarter inch borders) on the right 
end of landscape 8x10 photo paper.  The pages are trimmed to 8x8.5, leaving 
essentially a half inch binding margin on the left.  For binding I use the 
plastic comb style binding system - the one that has a string of 
rectangular holes.  (Office Max and other such places sell the machines 
that punch the holes and spread the plastic combs out while you fit the 
pages and covers on.)  For covers I use mat board (cut 8.5x8.75, to give a 
bit of overhang on the top, bottom and right of the photo stack.)  I use 
orange for Christmas books, and blue for the occasional book I make up for 
other occasions, like the books I made of high school theatrical 
productions that my kids were in.  Sometimes I'll make up a little book of 
4x5s, like I did recently to give a friend some pix I took at his 50th 
birthday party - much nicer than just giving him a envelope, and with the 
supplies on hand and the binding machine available,  a very simple project 
to put together

These are not terribly elegant things, but they are clearly all produced 
and constructed by me, and have become the most anticipated gifts each 
year.  Once you have the punch/binding machine the supplies are really 
quite inexpensive (and I don't think the punches are actually all that 
expensive themselves - but you do want to use the kind where you can enable 
or disable each hole punch individually.)  I make 8 or 9 books each 
Christmas, and they vary from 30 to 180 pictures in each (not everybody 
gets the same shots - my brother doesn't get many pix of my kids, and my 
mother in law doesn't get many pix of my brother's kids, etc.)  This will 
be the first year that I've done some of these pictures digitally - the 
first half of the year is all on film, and since July it's been all 
digital.  Going to be interesting to try to match the image tones in this 
year's books.  Next year I expect everything to be digital, and image tone 
can be whatever I think looks good.  FYI, the digital prints will be on 
Ilford Smooth Gloss paper from a Canon S9000 printer, using the Canon color 
inks.  (I'm going to try some bulk filled cartridges as soon as the current 
Canon ones run out, to see if I can cut the cost down - the Canon inks have 
given some VERY nice B&W results on this paper, at least to my eyes, and I 
think I can come pretty close to the look of the Ilford Multigrade RC that 
I use in the chemical darkroom.)

Hope this helps.  Drop me a note off list if you have any detail questions 
about my process.

Cheers,
Kip

At 10/9/2002 01:27 PM -0700, Jim P wrote:

>         I am going to try and make a book, or album type thing for my
>parents.  I was going to see if anyone had any information on this?  I was
>looking for info on-line but couldn't find any.  I was thinking if I can't
>find a way to make a book with my digital prints maybe I could just put them
>in some sort of nice looking binder, not sure if something like that exists
>though.  Any help would be great, thanks!